Category: Ramblings

Complicated ideas are under attack. We live in a dystopian ‘newspeak’ realm of 140 character tweets, simplistic yet popular ‘meme culture’, and more recently ‘fake news’ from our orangutan friend and all-powerful overlord, Donald Trump. This warrants a conversation about words- the building blocks of ideas. Or rather, the lack of- the zenith of which is […]

You can fit 14 Greenlands into Africa. That’s a fact. Yet on most maps, including Google’s Maps service, Greenland appears a gargantuan behemoth. A continental mass that dwarfs India, and in some particularly offensive cases, the entirety of South America. In all its wisdom Google seems to believe Greenland has more fjords than an Amazonian […]

When Mr Webb received the telegram: ‘Tipsified Pumgirdles Germany Novel’ it probably took him a moment to register that it was a coded message. It probably took him another moment to dust off his code book, and a final moment to realise the significance of the message. On the Aug. 5 1914, as the District Commissioner […]